Increasing Interdependence of Multivariate Distributions

Orderings of interdependence among random variables are useful in many economic contexts, for example, in assessing ex post inequality under uncertainty; in comparing multidimensional inequality; in valuing portfolios of assets or insurance policies; and in assessing systemic risk. We explore five orderings of interdependence for multivariate distributions: greater weak association, the supermodular ordering, the convex-modular ordering, the dispersion ordering, and the concordance ordering. For two dimensions, all five orderings are equivalent, whereas for an arbitrary number of dimensions n > 2, the five orderings are strictly ranked. For the special case of binary random variables, we establish some equivalences among the orderings.